Sexcapades

It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your cloves

On holiday a few years ago, my boyfriend and I went on a trip to San Francisco to meet some of his friends and enjoy the free and easy Californian summer. I met one of his best female friends and we really hit it off. We went to City Lights Bookstore (because I love Beat poetry) and I insisted on dinner at the infamous restaurant next door, called The Stinking Rose, where said Beat poets used to hang out. Somehow it didn’t register with me that ‘Stinking Rose’ means garlic and it was a garlic restaurant where every course (literally) was garlic heavy. I’ve always loved hummus and maybe I thought you could never have too much of a good thing. How wrong I was...

The first course was a delicious garlic bread, crunchy and dripping in garlic butter. We sipped on garlic frozen margaritas and locked eyes across the dinner table as garlic ragout with garlic croutons arrived for the main, followed by a garlic ice cream with spring onion garnish for dessert. We were a few margaritas in by this point and the foolishness of our restaurant choice hadn’t quite become clear as we walked back to the hotel, ready for a few more cocktails and a game of ‘Strip Poker’. One thing led to the next and we ended up in bed together, which would have been a good time except for the fact that it was punctuated by excessive trips to the bathroom to brush our teeth and shower as the garlic gradually permeated through our pores and breath, which wasn’t very sexy. A very pungent first threesome experience.

A week later, I arrived at my dad’s and was embarrassingly reminded of the escapade when he leaned in to hug me and said I ‘stank of garlic’ and ‘what on Earth had I been doing?’ All three of us since then have vowed that next time we feel adventurous in the bedroom, we will make less pongy dining decisions.